Blogging For Dollar$

I just wanted to do a little “yippee for me” moment here on BloggingPro, as today an article came out in the local newspaper called Blogging For Dollar$. While they did not focus heavily enough on the fact that blogging is NOT a get rich quick project, they did profile some great people, as well as mentioning me.

Not so long ago, blogs were mere hobbies for the tech-savvy or for conspiracy theorists who had finally found soapboxes from which they could address the world. Today, there are an estimated 50 million blogs on the Internet, so it’s hardly surprising that some have become profit-making ventures.

The so-called A-list bloggers have achieved both fame and fortune by posting news, gossip, opinions — or cheeky combinations of all three — online. Last October, Jason Calacanis reportedly sold Weblogs Inc.’s 85 blogs to AOL for $25-million U.S. Earlier this year, Michael Arrington quit his job as president of a startup to run one of the hottest technology blogs on the Internet, techcrunch.com, for $60,000 U.S. in advertising revenue each month, he told Business 2.0 in September.

About two-thirds of Canadian adults surfed the Internet in 2005, according to Statistics Canada, and cyberspace is now a key target for marketing campaigns. With millions of readers, top-rated blogs have easily convinced companies to take out banner ads on their websites. Bloggers typically charge advertisers based on the number of “impressions,” or page views, their blogs receive. The bigger a site’s readership, the more advertising dollars it can command.

Check out the full article at the Ottawa Citizen, and let me know what you think. Did the reporter understand blogging well enough? Do you think the traditional press shows blogging in the proper light?

Up until this article was published, I had not seen much positive press on blogging, and so I am interested in what you think.